The Trigger Read Online Free

insider, empire against empire, bloc against bloc – a conflict so cataclysmic it would destroy the old order. It was out of this turbulent collapse that Bolshevism, socialism, fascism and other radical political currents took root.
    I read about the origins of the First World War, a subject of such extensive academic focus over the years that Alan ‘A.J.P.’ Taylor, one of Britain’s sharpest historians, called it ‘a large-scale industry’. In the immediate aftermath of the fighting the victorious Allies laid the blame for the war solely on Germany, although later historians would develop a much wider causal kaleidoscope spreading responsibility across other combatant nations. For many researchers Luigi Albertini’s magisterial opus, The Origins of the War of 1914, provides the mother lode with its three hefty volumes of documents, correspondence and analysis. Sifting through more than 60,000 public papers from the build-up to the war, and interviewing as many of the protagonists as possible, consumed the last decades of Albertini’s life. After carefully polishing and editing his book, he would die in 1941 before completing the final chapter, on where he believed blame for the fighting ultimately lay. And ever since Albertini’s opus was published, archives in Vienna, Berlin, Istanbul and elsewhere have thrown up new material for experts dissecting the mutual suspicion between the Great Powers – Germany, France, Russia, Britain, Austria–Hungary – and the sequence of events that led to the collision on the battlefields of the Eastern and Western Fronts.
    From all this analysis of the Great War’s origins has emerged a tragic picture of self-destruction, one that was wilful, ignorant and inexorable: wilful, in that world leaders chose to leverage up a local crisis into a world war; ignorant, in that politicians, diplomats and generals failed to grasp the consequences; inexorable, in that once the process of militarisation began, there was no dissuading the old-world regimes. Arguments of historical interpretation still rage and analysis can disagree over subplots, such as the extent to which Germany was finessed into recklessly supporting Vienna by manipulative Austrian diplomats, or by what folly Britain drew Turkey into the war. But the consensus ultimately shared by many is that the complex deterrent system of diplomatic alliances designed to balance rivalries between the Great Powers was flawed, incapable of dispersing the storm clouds massing figuratively over early-twentieth-century Europe.
    My favourite, if slightly off-piste, inexorability theory was put forward by Alan Taylor, a don at my old Oxford college, Magdalen, long before I studied there. In War by TimeTable he argues convincingly that fixed railway schedules worsened the rush to war in 1914, especially for Germany. Railways were then the only feasible way to deploy large numbers of soldiers and materiel, but what was crucial, in Taylor’s view, was that timetable rigidity made it effectively impossible to stop the escalation. For one side to avoid being overwhelmed by an enemy whose troops had already entrained, it could not hold back the full deployment of its own soldiers. Timetable rigidity contributed to mass murder in the trenches.
    But the crisis still needed a spark to detonate the explosive mix of old-world superiority, diplomatic miscalculation, strategic paranoia and hubristic military overconfidence. And, like generations of young students before and since, I had been taught that the First World War began after the heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, was shot in Sarajevo by Gavrilo Princip. Academics still debate the diplomatic-political multiplier that transformed a Balkan assassination into a casus belli for the Great Powers, but none dispute that it was the shooting in Sarajevo that led the world to war a century ago. The assassination is so settled in the historical narrative that the exact details